The article introduces a German mathematician Otto Theodor Volk (1892‒1989), who worked as a professor at Lithuanian University in 1922–1930, and sheds light on his merits in the science of mathematics in Lithuania.

In the 19th century, in Poland divided among Russia, Austria and Prussia, the occupants hindered access to education for Poles. Fighting the restrictions, the Poles organized scientific institutions, published texts enabling self-study and founded high and academic private schools. In the Polish Kingdom in 19th century these schools were mostly clandestine, becoming legal at the beginning of 20th century. In Galicia, polonized high schools and universities in Lwów and Kraków educated students, including women, from all occupied territories. Many studied abroad. People educated in the second half of 19th century rebuilt the system of higher education in Poland Reborn.

From 1860s, the number of mathematicians, teachers and authors of monographs, textbooks and papers in Bohemia increased noticeably. This was due to the improvement of education and the emergence of societies. During 1870s and 1880s many candidates for teaching mathematics and physics were without regular position and income. Some of them went abroad (especially to the Balkans) where they obtained better posts and started to play important roles in the development of “national” mathematics and mathematical education. The article describes this remarkable phenomenon from the history of the Czech mathematical community and analyzes its influence on other national communities.

This article is a partial report of research on mathematical education at the Jagiellonian University in the period 1860‒1945. We give a description of the selected lectures: Calculus of Probability by Michał Karliński, Analytic Geometry by Franciszek Mertens, Marian Baraniecki’s lectures, Higher seminar (Weierstrass preparation theorem) by Kazimierz Żorawski, Principles of Set theory by Zaremba and Analytic function and Number theory by Jan Sleszyński. Moreover, short biographical notes of professors of mathematics of the Jagiellonian University Michał Karliński, Franciszek Mertens, Marian Baraniecki, Stanisław Kępiński, Kazimierz Żorawski, Stanisław Zaremba and Jan Sleszyński ‒ are given.

The school known as the Moscow school of the theory of functions or the school of D.F. Egorov – N.N. Luzin, originated in 1910s within the framework of the Moscow philosophical-mathematical school. As a matter of fact, its birth was transplanting into the Moscow soil of the French studies on set theory and the theory of functions (E. Borel, H. Lebesgue, R. Baire). This school appeared as an attempt of Muscovites to reach the front line of modern mathematical studies in an area alien to interests of mathematicians from St.- Petersbourg. The attempt has turned successful: its result was creation (in a very short period) of one of the most effective European schools with its own subjects of studies (analytic sets etc.). As a result of the activity of this school Moscow became one of the leading world mathematical centers. Already in the late 1920s, the research done in this school (through the works of P.S. Aleksandrov, A.O. Gelfond, M.V. Keldysh, A.Ya. Khinchin, A.N. Kolmogorov, M.A. Lavrent’ev, L.A. Lyusternik, P.S. Novikov, L.S. Pontryagin, A.N. Tikhonov, P.S. Urysohn etc.) went out very far from the problems which marked the beginning of the Moscow school of the functions theory.

The article highlights certain aspects of the set theory and topology in Puzyna’s work Theory of analytic functions (1899, 1900). In particular, the following notions are considered: derivative of a set, cardinality, connectedness, accumulation point, surface, genus of surface.

In the flow of mathematical ideas from the West to Central-Eastern Europe one can distinguish several typical forms: 1) foreign mathematicians, invited to cultivate mathematics upon new ground (e.g. Euler in Russia); 2) domestic mathematicians who completed their studies abroad and continued research after returning home (e.g. W. Buniakowski or M. Ostrogradski in Russia); 3) domestic mathematicians who dared developing new directions, thus initiating original schools of mathematics (e.g. N. N. Lusin in Russia). A separate phenomenon was a startling discovery of non-euclidean geometry (N. N. Lobatchevsky in Russia, J. Bolyai in Hungary).

The paper contains some scientific information on Władysław Zajączkowski (1837–1898) and on his first Polish monograph about ordinary and partial differential equations. Moreover, the aim of this paper is a presentation of selected scientific results of Polish mathematicians publishing in the nineteenth century in the field of ordinary and partial differential equations. Some more details about the publications on differential equations in the 19th century written by Polish mathematicians can be found in [3‒9].

This paper provides a general characteristic of the Cracow Scientific Society (Towarzystwo Naukowe Krakowskie). It existed 1815–1872 and during that time changed its name several times (see below). The Academy of Arts and Sciences (Akademia Umiejętności – AU) was founded in 1872, as a result of the transformation of the Cracow Scientific Society. Moreover, in this paper we present mathematical publications in the Annals of the Cracow Scientific Society.

This paper concerns a general characteristic of the Academy of Arts and Sciences in Cracow, together with the list of mathematical publications printed in the Memoirs of Academy (1872–1894).

This paper gives a general characteristic of the Society of Exact Sciences in Paris and its Memoirs, together with the list of mathematical publications printed in the Memoirs (1870–1882).

In Fribourg, Ignacy Mościcki found favorable conditions for the development of his engineering talents. He was one of the founders of the Swiss nitrogen and electrical industry. He announced the results of his works in Polish, German and French scientific journals. This was followed by rapid adaptation of Mościcki’s discoveries and inventions regarding the dielectric properties, the construction of technical high voltage capacitors, the construction of fuses protecting the electrical transmission lines against lightning, production of nitric acid from the air, the construction of devices used for absorption of gaseous substances, etc. His experience Mościcki transferred to Lvov.

The information about: 1) the liquefaction of oxygen and nitrogen in 1883 in Kraków, 2) the formulation in Lwow of the hypothesis of vegetal origin of crude oil, 3) the discovery of chromatography in 1903 in Warsaw, is given. The situation of chemical industry in the three parts of Poland partitioned among Russia, Germany and Austria is reported. A special attention is paid to the activity of Ignacy Łukasiewicz, who received for the first time in the world the kerosene from the crude oil, constructed and lighted in Lwow pharmacy in March 1853 the kerosene lamp. In 1854 he excavated petroleum shaft in Bóbrka and in 1856 he built a petroleum refinery in Ulaszowice near Jasło, getting ahead of USA, where the first petroleum refinery at Oil Creek was built five years later, in 1861.

The article shows the development of projection in the Antiquity, the origin of perspective in Renaissance and the development of orthogonal projection from the 16th up to the 18th century before descriptive geometry as a separate discipline of studies was established by Gaspard Monge. Furthermore, the paper presents the expansion of descriptive geometry through Europe in the 19th century with the emphasis on its bloom in the second half of the 19th century in Cisleithania.

Since 1800s, Central European mathematicians have achieved great results in hyperbolic geometry. The paper is devoted to brief description of the background as well as history of these results.

In 1850 a very important decision for the whole history of humanities and social sciences in Russia was made by Nicholas I, the Emperor of Russia: to eliminate the teaching of philosophy in public universities in order to protect the regime from the Enlightenment ideas. Only logic and experimental psychology were permitted, but only if taught by theology professors. On the one hand, this decision caused the development of the Russian theistic philosophy enhanced by modern methodology represented by logic and psychology of that time. On the other hand, investigations in symbolic logic performed mainly at the Kazan University and the Odessa University were a bit marginal. Because of the theistic nature of general logic, from 1850 to 1917 in Russia there was a gap between philosophical and mathematical logics.

The notion of connectedness was introduced by Listing in 1847 and was further developed by Riemann, Jordan and Poincaré. The notion and rigorous definition of metric and topological space were formed in Frechet’s works in 1906, and in Hausdorff’s works in 1914. The notion of continuum could be traced back to antiquity, but its mathematical definition was formed in XIX century, in the works of Cantor and Dedekind, later of Hausdorff and Riesz. Karl Weierstrass (1815–1897) brought mathematical analysis to a rigorous form; also, the notions of future areas of mathematics – functional analysis and topology – were formed in his reasoning. Weierstrass’s works were not translated into Russian, and his lectures were not published even in Germany. In 1989, synopses of his lectures devoted to additional chapters of the theory of functions were published. Their material served as the basis for this article.

The article is devoted to the evolution of concept of a number in XVIII–XIX c. Ch. Méray’s, H. Heine’s, R. Dedekind`s, G. Cantor’s and K. Weierstrass`s constructions of a number are considered. Only original sources were used.

Jan Jędrzejewicz was an eminent Polish amateur astronomer. He lived and worked as a doctor in a small town of Płońsk, situated 60 km of Warsaw. His great passion was astronomy and he devoted his all free time to it. After gaining essential knowledge, he built observatory, which he professionally equipped with his own funds. The main subject of his work was micrometer measurements of double stars, to which he applied himself with unusual precision and diligence. This was appreciated by an American astronomer S.W. Burnham, who included these results in his catalogue of double stars. Jędrzejewicz also observed the Sun, comets, planets and other sky phenomena, and the results of his works were published in the international journals: “Astronomische Nachrichten” and “Vierteljahrsschrift Astronomischen Ggesellschaft”. Noteworthy in his papers are extremely thorough investigation of the subject and a great number of references to papers of contemporaneous professional astronomers. Jędrzejewicz aroused interest of the scientific world, which was demonstrated by the fact that information about him appeared several times in the journal “Nature”.

In this article I present Lucjan Emil Böttcher (1872‒1937), a little-known Polish mathematician active in Lwów. I outline his scholarly path and describe briefly his mathematical achievements. In view of later developments in holomorphic dynamics, I argue that, despite some flaws in his work, Böttcher should be regarded not only as a contributor to the area but in fact as one of its founders.

This paper presents the reception of mathematical logic (semantics and methodology of science are entirely omitted, but the foundations of mathematics are included) in Poland in the years 1870–1920. Roughly speaking, Polish logicians, philosophers and mathematicians mainly followed Boole’s algebraic ideas in this period. Logic as shaped by works of Gottlob Frege and Bertrand Russell became known in Poland not earlier than about 1905. The foundations for the subsequent rapid development of logic in Poland in the interwar period were laid in the years 1915–1920. The rise of Polish Mathematical School and its program (the Janiszewski program) played the crucial role in this context. Further details can be found in [8]. This paper uses the material published in [20‒24].

The Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth lost independence in 1795 and was partitioned among her  powerful neighbours: Austria, Prussia and Russia. The two old Polish universities in Cracow and Lvov enjoyed relatively liberals laws in the Austrian partition. It was there that Polish physicists (Karol Olszewski, Zygmunt Wróblewski, Marian Smoluchowski, Władysław Natanson, Wojciech Rubinowicz, Czesław Białobrzeski, and others) made most important discoveries and original contributions. There was no possibility of career for Poles living in the oppressive Russian and Prussian partitions where even the use of Polish language was forbidden in schools. Thus many bright Polish students such as e.g. Kazimierz Fajans, Stefan Pieńkowski, Maria Skłodowska, and Mieczysław Wolfke, went abroad to study in foreign universities. In spite of unfavourable conditions under which they had to live and act in the period 1870‒1920, Polish scholars were not only passive recipients of new ideas in physics, but made essential contributions to several fields such as e.g. cryogenics, electromagnetism, statistical physics, relativity, radioactivity, quantum physics, and astrophysics.